How to tell you have a dishonest or unprofessional broker?

by RobotFX Team

May 22, 2019

Announcement

I’ve had these email conversations with a client recently. He is using our Auto Recovery EA and told us that the expert advisor opened 2 hedging trades instead of one, as it is supposed to do. This is a singular case and at first I’ve blamed the use of a VPS. Obviously, if the EA is running on 2 machines (ie personal PC and VPS), they might both trade the same time. This might still be the case, as far as we know.

How to tell you have a dishonest or unprofessional broker?

Anyway, I’ve explained already to him how the EA works, but I believe I haven’t done a very good job. So this is what I think it happens (again, assuming there is a single instance of his EA running), step-by-step, hopeful more traders will read and understand:

at every tick, our EA counts the trades on the chart
IF there is an opened trade AND doesn’t have a pending hedging order, THAN the EA sends one pending order to the broker’s server

That’s is. When next tick moves the price, it repeats 1&2:

the EA counts the trades on the chart
since now there is a hedging pending order on the chart, the EA does nothing

I repeat: as long as there is a second pending order, opposite than the first one, with a higher lotsize (depending on the EA’s settings), the EA won’t do anything else. Its job is done. It’s a simple IT THIS >> THAN THAT line of code.

Now, this is what I think it happens right after the EA sends one pending order to the broker’s server: the broker simply delays its execution. I have no idea how/why this is done. But it is the only thing I can think of. Basically:

the EA sends the order command
the broker receives it but doesn’t execute it right away
on the next tick the EA checks and sees that there’s still no pending order, so it sends another command
suddenly and magically the broker decides to trigger both orders – from the screenshots I’ve received, it is a small time delay between these 2 trades, so this would make sense.

THIS SHOULD NOT HAPPEN

Not with an honest reliable broker, at least.

If you have similar issues with other EAs, from other providers, I strongly advice you to change your broker. I cannot really point to the best broker, after all none of them are 100% good – think that they want your money, after all. But you can always try on demo, then trade small lotsize to check whether the broker behaves normally.